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‘IT is time India joins the global e-conomy’

PHOTO: K. MURALI KUMAR

WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY: R. Bandyopadhyay (left), Special Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, R. Sivakumar (centre), Managing Director (South Asia), Intel Technology, and R. N. Prabhakar, Member (Technology), TRAI, at a conference in Bangalore on Wednesday.

BANGALORE: Because India carries no baggage of legacy systems, it has an unparalleled opportunity to be the world leader in wireless broadband, feels R. Sivakumar, Managing Director (South Asia) at chip maker Intel. While the Government has made it the mission to grow the numbers of Internet connections to 40 million and the number of the broadband-enabled to 20 million by 2010, this was, in fact, a rather modest target — the country should aim rather to reach 500 million Net connections, a fifth of which should be broadband, he adds.

Mr Sivakumar was delivering the opening keynote at the second annual conference on broadband and wireless technologies organised by the Manufacturers’ Association of Information Technology (MAIT) here Tuesday. Indeed countries like Brazil had breezed past India in Net penetration, and reaped the benefits: a strong correlation with the national GDP.

R. N. Prabhakar, Member (Technology), Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), suggested that the landline telephone system, now consisting of some 40 million connections, was still a good bet to deliver broadband services — but while existing copper lines had some limitations, fibre was ideally suited. However the ’right of way’ was now seen as a money earner even by local bodies and was inhibiting providers from extending this infrastructure.

R. Bandyopadhyay, Special Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, admitted that last year’s broadband targets were not met, the 3.3 million connections had a spread of over 1,000 towns. However, he exhorted the industry to help bring down the cost of Internet access devices like PCs and announced that the Government had decided to offer the 2.5 GHz band for wireless broadband and 2.1 GHz for 3G mobile services. The conference saw presentations by industry and public sector experts from BSNL, Bharti Airtel, Microsoft,Telsima, Wipro, D-Link, Texas Instruments as well as educational institutions like Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Manipal University.

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